Microwave photonic de-chirp receiver for breaking the detection range swath limitation.

A novel microwave photonics-based de-chirp radar receiver which breaks the limitation of the detection range swath is proposed and demonstrated. In the proposed receiver, a multi-channel time-division photonics de-chirp processing is implemented to increase the detection range swath. A linear frequency modulated pulse train is sent to multiple reception channels and temporally delayed in the optical domain to form reference signal replicas, enabling time-division photonics-de-chirp processing with echoes reflected from different distance regions so that the total detection range swath is increased and determined by the number of reference replicas.

Channelized photonic-assisted deramp receiver with an extended detection distance along the range direction for LFM-CW radars.

A novel photonic-assisted deramp receiver extends detection distance along range direction of linearly-frequency-modulated continuous wave (LFM-CW) radars is proposed. A dual-polarization quadrature phase shift keying (DP-QPSK) modulator is used to modulate an optical frequency-comb (OFC) to generate orthogonally polarized optical signals. Then the orthogonally polarized optical signals are coherently detected with an optical local oscillator (OLO), which is generated by modulating the other OFC with the RF-reference signal on a null-biased Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM).